Discussion Questions for Wednesday, August 31
After reading the questions below and deciding which one(s) you want to respond to (you're expected to respond once every three classes, on average), click on the appropriate thread to write your response as a reply. If you have not yet registered an account with wikispaces and requested to join this site, you will need to do so to post a response (see the How to Wiki page for instructions).
Huizinga opens his foreword to Homo Ludens by noting that "a happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens" (ix). Huizinga is writing in 1938, in German, his completed book to be published in Switzerland, a citizen of the Netherlands who would spend the last three years of his life as a prisoner of the Nazis. Why, given the times, might Huizinga be inclined to doubt the notion of human beings as, at their core, knowing, wise, and reasonable? And why, given the times, and Huizinga's own situation, might it be difficult -- but perhaps necessary? -- for a cultural theorist to make a case for play as a central part of the human experience? (Be sure to quote from the text in support of your answer.)
On pages 8-13, Huizinga lays out what he considers the essential characteristics of human play -- in summation, writing that "we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary' life as being 'not serious,' but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means" (13). Being sure to quote from the text in support of your answer, how can you reconcile the co-existence of some of these very different, even opposed, characteristics: social but secretive, intense but "not serious," outside ordinary life but time-and-space limited, free but orderly and rule-bound?
What sense would J. Huizinga make of the kind of uploaded re-enactments on YouTube that we were looking at earlier in the week? How would they fit (or not) his definition of and criteria for play? Or has the world, its technical, and the business of entertainment changed so much as to make his theories outdated? Be sure to 1) quote directly from Huizinga's writing in your answer and 2) to refer to specific YouTube (or other online site) videos.
After reading the questions below and deciding which one(s) you want to respond to (you're expected to respond once every three classes, on average), click on the appropriate thread to write your response as a reply. If you have not yet registered an account with wikispaces and requested to join this site, you will need to do so to post a response (see the How to Wiki page for instructions).